Programming note: Join Steyn tomorrow, Saturday, for a another edition of his Serenade Radio show, On the Town. This week's broadcast features Number One records, French and Nigerian songwriters, dictaphones, and a bigtime rocker's favourite cover version. The fun starts at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe/12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Welcome to the sixty-sixth audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time - and our seventh venture into the work of Jack London, author of our popular serialisation Burning Daylight and of one of the world's greatest short stories, To Build a Fire.
The Unparalleled Invasion is another London short story, first published in 1910, just a few years after the Russo-Japanese War. As I note in my introduction, that conflict had a profound psychological effect on the western powers. As Jack London writes:
Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904. Now the Japanese race was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples. In some strange way Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer. Japan swiftly assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, and so capably applied them that she suddenly burst forth, full-panoplied, a world-power...
Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptly set about dreaming a colossal dream of empire for herself. Korea she had made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges and vulpine diplomacy gave her the monopoly of Manchuria. But Japan was not satisfied. She turned her eyes upon China...
And thus a world-historical transformation begins. In London's telling, relations between China and the west come to a head in the mid-Seventies, which is a little premature. But in other ways this is a highly prescient tale about a slumbering giant's unconventional rise to global dominance.
To hear me read the first part of The Unparalleled Invasion, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
~Thank you for all your appreciative comments, which continue to pour in, about our last Tale for Our Time - The Flying Inn by G K Chesterton. Denis Searby, a Steyn Clubber from Sweden, says:
Mark,
Thanks so much for The Flying Inn! I am a great Chesterton admirer but that was one of his books I had actually never got around to reading. It really sounded like you had so much fun singing his lyrics throughout!
Peter Lucey, a First Week Founding Member from the English Home Counties, also enjoyed it:
Just finished listening to the final chapter - thank you for a wonderful rendition!. I remembered Hibbs However's hilarious editing of the letters to his paper, but had forgotten the chemists' selling booze.
The ending is, as always, poignant.
My fellow Ontarian, Leo, writes:
Thanks again, Mark, for a terrific reading. What struck me about the ending was how the "enemy" was within the gates without any awareness of how it got there. Slowly, then suddenly, it seems. This is where it falls apart as a prediction of our situation. We now are inviting the enemy in, and paying them to undermine our society. Either we need our own Dalroy or we are done.
Raymond Kujawa connects The Flying Inn to an earlier Chesterton book:
In light of the way the story ended, it seemed to reflect a paragraph from GKC (Heretics) on Mr. H.G.Wells and things worth fighting for. Mr. Wells had written a book title Utopia which appeared to reflect the world that Lord Ivywood and his Turkish associates were trying to set up in England, irrespective of whether it suited the English ways and values of living full lives on their own terms. Utopias disregard the importance of the philosophy of original sin and are indifferent to human psychology. They abolish all patriotic boundaries and partially do this in the mistaken belief that this will prevent all future wars. Since there will always be varieties in art and opinion, it is silly to think there won't be varieties in governments.
"Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing also tends to differentiation. You can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization."
And one more from South Carolina member Larry Durham:
It's always a bitter sweet moment when a TFOT comes to an end - I'm actually tapping this message out before I listen to this final installment - and before my nightly lamp lowering. Nevertheless, many thanks for yet another splendid telling.
There's so much to ponder in this tale - Western civilization has a virtual army of Ivywoods and Misysras to battle. I hope we have the Pumps and Dalroys to do the job. It is almost certainly coming down to cases.
Thank you for that, Larry. We have all kinds of tales in our archives, from the leisurely comedy of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat to P G Wodehouse with a social conscience in Psmith, Journalist - oh, and some fusty notions of honor and duty in a certain other fellow's The Prisoner of Windsor. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is both highly relevant and a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: over seven years' worth of my audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We've introduced a similar tile format for my Sunday Poems and also for our Hundred Years Ago Show.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club over seven years ago, and I'm overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As I said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that the bulk of our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, Jane Austen, H G Wells, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell, Baroness Orczy, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus a couple of pieces of non-classic fiction by yours truly. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live occasionally, and sometimes with special guests on The Mark Steyn Cruise.
I'm truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last seven years has been our nightly radio serials. If you've enjoyed them and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as this coming Wednesday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show and our other video content;
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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to The Unparalleled Invasion but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you think The Unparalleled Invasion is a bust, feel free to have at it.
And do join us tomorrow evening for the conclusion of Jack London's geopolitical caper.
